I have never received checks with any bank account I have opened in my life. Are they even offered anymore?

You have to order them. They don't just give them to you.

Discover gives free standard checks, as many as you want.

Yes, they are used all the time in the US.

The numbers on the bottom are the routing number and account number of the payer. Anyone can make and sell them, and anyone can buy them.

https://www.costcochecks.com/home

Absolutely. I currently rent from an elderly couple and the simplest method of paying rent is the classic check.

You have to pay for them but yes you can still get checks. My order of 80 checks should last me the rest of my life.

The fewer entities that have it, the better. Banks probably aren’t giving it out freely. Any ACH charge attempted against it will deduct balance, and fraud liability repayments (if the bank agrees to help) will take as long as the bank takes to recover funds

>fraud liability repayments (if the bank agrees to help) will take as long as the bank takes to recover funds

What's your source on that? As far as I know, Regulation E generally requires banks to make good on errors in electronic fund transfers (including ACH transfers for which the customer is not liable) within 10 days of being notified. That can be in the form of a provisional credit while an investigation is ongoing, though.

That's what makes this particularly galling since Zelle is just a frontend to ACH.

Is regulation E new (in the past decade)? I had a fraud related issue on Simple.com about 10 years back where Kroger decided to keep erratically billing my debit card up until it hit $1000 (I went in and spent probably $20 and their payments system seemed to just go haywire) and I asked their support for help. It took a month to get money back. That was my final straw with debit cards.

No; it's originally from the late 70s - I don't know exactly when the various provisions relating to error handling got introduced, to be honest; it's possible it was somewhat different back then.

Many banks/CUs have a policy where the printed account number is only for checks and doesn't correlate to the internal account number.

It's not a complete guard, but it does prevent ACH attacks.